Crittercism, the leader in mobile App Performance Management (mAPM), today announced its “Mobile Experience Benchmark Report – MWC 2015 Edition” at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The new report was released in recognition that mobile is mission critical to business today and that a clear understanding of the factors that affect app performance is key to a successful digital strategy. The data is aggregated from Crittercism’s one billion plus monthly active users across more than 120 countries.

With smartphones at consumers’ fingertips 24/7, mobile apps are at the core of the digital consumer decision journey. Consumers are turning towards mobile apps for researching and buying new products and services—the in-app digital channel is now critical for acquiring new customers, stimulating sales and growing market share,” said Robert Kwok, CTO and co-founder of Crittercism. “There is a premium for getting the in-app experience right, yet many companies operate in the dark when dealing with customer frustrations caused by apps with poor performance. We created our latest benchmark report to help companies make data-driven decisions when designing their apps.”

Apps that consume a lot of resources across the stack – e.g., CPU, GPU, network calls and bandwidth – such as photo, video and games tend to crash more frequently. The categories with the highest crash rates include:

On the device front, Samsung dominates the Android ecosystem, with the Samsung Galaxy S5 replacing the S3 with the previously largest share of installed base. The Galaxy S5 reached 20 percent of app load traffic within 30 weeks.

Google Play Category Crash Rates

On average, Google Play crash rates per category are higher than the AppStore’s. Similarly, however, resource-intensive apps display the highest crash rates on Android:

Entertainment (5.3%)

Business (3.4%)

Photography (3.3%)

Platform Experience

The different roll-out approaches for iOS and Android have implications for the consumer and developer experience:

Consumer experience: iOS users enjoy faster availability of the latest OS features, while Android users are gated from updates by carriers and OEMs.

Developer experience: When developing on Android, developers have to account for fragmentation and may not be able to take advantage of all the latest OS features.

Additionally, Crittercism will be showcasing their latest and greatest at Mobile World Congress 2015. If you’re interested in learning more about the company and its leading app performance management solution, please fill out the request form to schedule a meeting or visit the company booth at stand d15 in hall 8.1.